Garret's Failure
by 269
Summary: I loved the relationship between Garret and Kate in Breaking Dawn Part Two. Something strange is happening in the human world and it threatens to tear Garret and Kate apart. Please read and review. I'm new so reviews and messages would be welcome.
1. Chapter 1

Garret's Failure

This world is nothing but a quick movement from one place to the next. For those who watch their worlds through television sets it becomes as meaningless as the life of a factory farm chicken. Their bodies scraped away at the end, and dumped in the ground, mourners becoming fewer and fewer every year as they are all but forgotten as time leaves them behind. Then there are those who accomplish, succeed, who want more for themselves than a life of TV, popcorn chicken, and sprayed celebrities. They invent, discover, live, create, and explore. They love. And these are the few who are remembered forever.

Garret sat on the roof of the house and rested his elbows on his knees. He watched the sisters as they left their home and set out to catch a meal in the forest. She didn't turn to look at him, but he knew that she wanted to. Her lips always parted slightly when they made eye contact, as though she needed him to kiss her with a sudden and thirsty immediacy. Her sisters always laughed. Making her stand up, fold her delicate arms and say, 'You still here?'

Later on they would make love like beasts.

She was back before they were. A mere ten minutes she'd spent catching deer with her teeth and when she came back she looked up at him. Her lips parted. He rushed down and was in her arms and kissing her before she had time to close them again. She tasted like blood. She was covered in it. He sucked it off her chin and kissed her again, sliding his hand down to her lower back so he could pull her up towards him. She grabbed clumps of his hair in her fists and pulled him down to her.

'I wanted to get here before my sisters,' she said.

'You should eat properly. You should stay longer.'

'I can't.'

She looked at his eyes. The red in his pupils was fading but only because he had not eaten anything since leaving the Cullen place. They were a creamy auburn now, and the whites of his eyes had gone grey.

'You should eat,' she said. She pushed him back gently, and folded her arms. 'You have to eat something eventually. Deer. Rabbit. Wolf. Whatever. The deer is best because the blood is mostly the same as human. It's Muman.'

Garret laughed. 'What's Muman?'

'Mock Human. Don't laugh,' she said, smiling. 'This is serious, Garret. You have to eat something or you'll begin to fade. I can feel how weak you are even now.'

Garret was close to her lips but pulled himself back when she said this. 'I'm weak?' he said. 'I haven't been weak since I was three.' He flicked his eye up to his left eyebrow and then back down again. He added, 'the human three.'

'Oh, I see,' she said. 'And do you want to test that theory?'

She circled him. Her hands lit up with sparks of blue electricity.

He cleared his throat, 'Well, I don't want to hurt you.'

She smiled, and lunged for him.

He moved out of the way and embraced her from behind, stopping her from tripping over a stone that he had worked into the ground with his boot a moment ago. 'You're beautiful, Miss Electric Blue, but I'm quick.'

She spun around and brought her hands to his cheeks, but he was gone before she could touch him. She fell to the ground on her backside. He laughed somewhere in the near distance.

'You think that's speed?' she said. She thumped the ground, and trails of blue lit up the cracks in the ground. Three small weeds caught fire and died. 'I'll show you speed.'

She flung herself up to where he stood on the thickest and highest branch of a tree. Crouching over, he had been watching her. But now she was standing up, above him, ready to shock him into defeat. He hadn't heard her. He was still watching, trying to discover her through the thin covering of leaves.

She stroked his face.

He turned around, sharply, then stood up, towering over her.

'You didn't shock me.'

She shook her head. 'I didn't want to.'

He kissed her again, his brown hair stroking her forehead and his rough fingers exploring the smoothness of her cheek, and the delicacy of her jawbone. They were one. Beautiful and horrific, they gave flesh and life to the concept of both eternal love, and eternal damnation.

Yet they never said what they knew to be true. It was a curse among vampires only the eldest knew. The three words, so meaningless and fleeting, they both knew was a curse to say out loud. Every vampire before they were turned loved someone, and had to watch them wither and die while they remained as perfect and untouched as marble statues. I love you was an invitation for despair.

Instead they just stared into each other, into the emptiness of each other, where the human soul used to be and both said simply, 'I am you.' And for the first time in centuries they began to feel as though something long lost and almost forgotten had been returned to them.

They were whole.

In the shower, she washed the blood of a previous human victim out of his hair. He didn't know it was there, but to her, who had long ago given up human blood, it smelled so strongly that she could almost see the face of the human he had murdered.

She was young, healthy, addicted to sushi and cinnamon lattes. She cried when animal charity ads came on the TV. She hadn't found love yet but she hoped it would find her. That's why she trusted him when he offered to walk her home. And then...

Kate got out of the shower.

'What's wrong?' he said. He slipped into fresh clothes, his hair dripping water onto the shoulders of his shirt, and stood behind her as she leaned over the balcony in her room. Bare breasted and skin like silver satin in the light of the crescent moon.

'I can see her.'

'Who?'

She turned to look at him. Her lips didn't part this time. 'Your last meal.'

'Oh.'

'She was beautiful.'

He sat down on the bed. 'She was.'

'Young.'

He looked down at his feet, then back up again. 'She was.'

'And attracted to you.'

'Yes.'

She turned back to the world outside and listened to the noise of the animals as they slept and dreamed in their tiny nests. 'It's not your fault,' she said finally. 'She's gone now. Most of her on the day she saw a man she thought she could love, the rest of her, down the drain, washed out by his lover.'

He kissed her neck, and bit her earlobe gently. He whispered, 'I hope to one day see them as you do.'

'Why does she lay there like that?' He had asked one of the sisters when he first arrived. The other sisters did not have beds, but she, Kate, had one that may have been an antique even one hundred years ago. It was beautiful, four posted, rich Indian curtains and smooth sheets, made even more beautiful because it was where she lie.

He was looking at her through a crack in the door. He had gotten bored after twenty minutes, so he got up and went out of the room, leaving her in peace.

'She is trying to dream,' they said.

In a town just five miles away from the Denali household, a woman walks the streets. Clip Clop. She is wearing platform heeled boots. Sing Song. She is humming a tune. She sprays herself with perfume. There is no one else around in this small town but she sprays the air and herself and all around herself and paces. In her left hand she has a phone. It is open, and her thumb is poised over the hash key. She is humming still.

Garret is on the roof again. He closes his eyes and listens to the sounds of the nocturnal animals as they dig and play. He will try one tonight. For her. His eyes drift from the forest and fixate on the streetlights of the town just to the left. This is where the humans sleep. He goes to the edge of the house, still with his eyes closed, and listens. He can hear the female human humming from his place on the edge of the roof. He shakes his head and goes back to focussing on the animals as they lick each other and spit hair into a stream. He shudders. And refocuses. For her.

He opens his eyes and leaps from the roof and runs into the forest.

He doesn't know how it happens – maybe hunger has deprived him of control – but it happens.

The woman walking in the streets has stopped humming. In front of her is a man. He is six foot three. Athletic. Well dressed. Unshaven. Unkempt hair. Eyes that show so much grief, so much emotion. Eyes that seem red from this angle. Pale skin. White teeth. Nice smile. Runs fast.

He is on her quickly, and he holds her scream back with the palm of his hand. He is growling. He hasn't done that in so many years that when it comes out it feels foreign, and makes his throat ache. He places his cheek next to hers and breathes her in, she is wearing Chanel, but this is overpowered by the sweetness of the pumping blood. 'Sing to me,' he says, and kisses her neck gently. 'Sing to me the song that you were just singing.'

She struggles at first, but he is strong. She weeps, and through his fingers she begins to hum a tune. It is a tune from his childhood, but broken up slightly and changed as generations and generations passed it incorrectly from one child to the next. His mother was a gypsy, and used to sing this to him to make him sleep before she prostituted herself to violent men in their home.

He hummed the tune with the girl. And soon their two different versions, generations apart, began to fold together and become the same.

He looked into her eyes. So afraid. Then he did something he didn't think he would ever be capable of. He let her go.

Garret fell to his knees as the woman ran screaming from him, waving her phone in the air and calling out into the night like some kind of chittering monkey. He was so hungry, and so happy. A life with Kate was possible now that he had resisted this singular temptation.

He stood up, smiling, and was about to walk away but couldn't stop staring at the girl.

She was screaming, but this stopped when a light came on in one of the houses. She looked back at him, and just stood there. Then she brought her fingers to her lips and whispered, 'hush.' She waited until the curtains opened up and then she began to dance in the street.

Garret watched, mesmerised.

'I am so drunk!' she sang. 'I am so drunk! That's why I am screaming be-cause I am so drunk!' She lifted her legs, one by one, in the air and began to walk like a wind-up toy soldier, towards him. She laughed, and purposely fell to the floor. The curtain closed, and she straightened up and looked over at him. She pressed a key on her phone and before Garret could understand the situation five men appeared from the bunker of the house beside him.

He stepped backwards, but kept his eyes fixated on the woman as she winked at him and walked over to meet the men.

He looked at each man individually, and at the woman once more. There were four humans, all wearing white masks that had a picture of Halloween vampire teeth on the front, those long canine things that always made his species feel uncomfortable. The man in front was in a wheelchair. He was older than the rest of them, by physical appearance, about 60, and by the many years he had been wandering the earth.

He was a vampire.

And he was sitting in a wheelchair. His legs had been broken and torn away below the knees.

The girl kissed him. 'Sorry great great granddaddy,' she said. 'I screamed.' She looked at Garret. 'I couldn't help it. It's scary lookin' isn't it.'

The vampire looked at him. 'Yes,' he said. 'It is.'

Garret wanted to look back towards the house. Towards the place he had finally been able to call home, and to where the woman, his woman, was laying at this moment in a peaceful semblance of sleep. He had ruined it.

'I don't know what you want,' Garret said. 'But I don't have anything for you. If this is your territory then I'm sorry for walking on it. I haven't hurt anyone. I didn't hurt your... granddaughter? Granddaughter. I haven't touched anything. I do not live here, and now I'm going to leave.'

Garret turned in the opposite direction of the Denali household, and started to walk in that direction before the four human men ran in front of him.

'You're not that quick, are you?' said the other vampire.

Garret's head slumped slightly. He turned to face the old vampire, his feet felt as though they were caked in cement. 'I'm hungry,' he said. 'That's all.'

The old man smiled. He didn't have any teeth, and his gums were a mess of slats and slits here and there as though his teeth had been cut out. The old man nodded towards his granddaughter. 'Then why don't you eat her? Try it, go on she tastes salty. I've brought her up on Sicilian olives, very satisfying.' He licked his lips.

Garret shook his head.

The girl rubbed her arms. 'Why doesn't it like me?' She pleaded. 'Do you think it can smell the...'

'Hush child!'

The old man bent down and unhooked something, a tube with a needle, from the side of the wheelchair, and another tube without a needle from the other side. He placed the end of the needleless tube in his mouth, and pushed the tube with the needle into his granddaughters arm. Garret watched as the red liquid seeped into the tube, made its way around the back of the chair, wrapped around the armrest twice, and then made its way slowly upwards, disappearing into the old man's mouth.

He took the tube out of his mouth. 'Here,' he said. 'I'll make it easy for you.'

A single drop of salty human blood ballooned out of the end of the tube, and escaped it, forming a complete circle in the air, and falling down – so slowly and completely – to meet the ground and spread outwards, following the slight slope of the ground, like a paw print.

Garret's insides ached.

'Try it,' the old man said. 'Try it, go on.'

_No, for her, I cannot._

'Try it. You are hungry, aren't you? Feeding doesn't always mean murder my friend.'

_I cannot._

'Do it. Do it! Or I shall set fire to the house up yonder, and you can watch the bitches burn!'

Garret clenched his fists. He felt a tiny amount of strength return to him, and it was enough. He'd do anything for her. It scared him, because he would even risk losing her if it meant saving her life.

He didn't go for the tube; instead he lifted his predatorial eyes to the girl and lunged for her. She backed away when she saw those eyes but her grandfather, whose arms were stronger than they looked, pushed her forward into the chest of the hungry vampire with as much force as he could gather.

Garret's teeth tore through the girl's neck as though it was wet cardboard. She screamed, but not for long. He heard a voice saying 'don't worry, enjoy her, I have others,' but not fully because the sound of the girls blood was too loud to hear anything beyond it. It flew into his mouth and moistened his dry tongue and slipped down his throat like warm cream. The salt of the olives was a delightful surprise, but so was the alcohol of the shot she'd drunk to calm her nerves earlier. Salt and absinthe. The sweat of the young. He lapped her up like a dog until she fell like a lump in his arms, and hit the floor.

He was strong again. His eyes were as red as vintage wine. He was Garret once again.

'Wonderful!' screamed the old man. The humans closed in around them both. 'Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful! Now,' he leaned in 'how do you feel? Tell me exactly.'

Garret thought of Kate suddenly, good warm kind hearted Kate, and wondered if the first dream she had would be of this. A nightmare of blood and teeth and disloyalty and regret. He sank to the floor. He had failed her. He was the dirty gypsy thief once again, trying to win the affections of an angel who was so far out of his reach she was almost human. 'I feel like shit,' he said.

'That's how you're supposed to feel. Anything else?'

Garret looked up at the old man. 'What do you mean?' The old man was leaning forward so far in his wheelchair he was balancing off the end of it. Something wasn't right. But he had been too weak to realise that something was very wrong before. He tried to stand, but he fell back onto his forearm.

'Oh, no.' The old man sang. 'No, no, no, no, no. You can't do that, old friend. You can't do that. Mustn't get up!'

The world slipped away and came back and spun upside down. The concrete road came up suddenly to meet Garret's face. He couldn't move. 'What ... did ... you?'

'How does it feel?'

Garret's words were taken away from him. All he could say was. 'Fire. Inside.'

The old man clapped, and used his great strength to slide himself out of his wheelchair and lay himself on the floor next to Garret. He propped himself up on his elbows and shone a light into Garrets eyes. He used his thumbs to rub Garret's eyelids, before opening them again and shining the light there once more.

The old man laughed.

Garret felt himself slipping away, far away. Maybe it was for the best.

Or not.

_You're not one to feel sorry for yourself, Garret. You're not one to die on the floor like some drunken human. Get up. You sonofabitch! Get up and make sure this freak doesn't finish you off. You have to stay, for Kate, She needs you. _

He imagined Kate now. Standing in front of him and asking him to get up. 'Get up, Garret! Stop being such a pussy! Get up and come back to me! Or I swear to God I'll never let you rest in the afterlife.'

Garret rose up on his knees. The old man looked at him and said, 'No, no that's not supposed to happen. Get back down there.' The old man saw Garret rise, stumbling, onto his feet. He pulled himself back up into his wheelchair and shouted for the guards to come and 'take care of it!'

Garret looked back at them as they raised their guns and shot. Garret smiled weakly. Fire came out of those things instead of bullets, but when the flames dyed down the tall vampire had disappeared into the forest.

'Damn!' spat the old man. He turned his chair to face his guards but the wheels caught on the hair of his granddaughter. 'Oh! Take care of this will you?'

They moved the body, hacking off a chunk of caught hair with knives.

'You want us to take care of her? Incineration?'

'No,' the old vampire said. 'The more people who know about the existence of vampires the better. She is a necessary sacrifice in the war against the vampire.'

He wheeled his chair forward, spun it around and looked back up towards the Denali house. 'And who better to know of the weaknesses of vampires than a vampire.'

He craned his neck. 'I can hear him. He gets tired. He is falling. He is struggling and getting up and walking, so slowly, towards the house again.'

The old man places a cigarette between his lips and lights the end. The red ash casts shadows over his face, highlighting only the forehead and cheeks and turning his head into a pale toothless skull. 'The poison works.' He said simply. 'The introduction into the blood stream is harmful only to those who ingest large quantities of the blood. Vampires.'

One of the guards spat into the snow. 'But what about them? The sisters? They only eat animals don't they?'

'Don't worry. We've pumped it into the water. Anything that drinks water will have an immunity to the vampire bite.'

'And him?'

The old man stubbed the cigarette out in the palm of his hand. He laughed. 'Trust me. He won't get very far.'


	2. Chapter 2 - The Lust and Thirst

The Lust and Thirst

What else could he do but think of her. He fell to his knees twice, fell down on the cold mud like he did when the men from the town had come to burn their camp to the ground. He was twelve, and he saw not for the first time the cruelty of men. His grandfather was burned in his bed, and his mother was beaten to death trying to save his little sister from being raped. She was nine. They strangled her when they were done.

He was twelve, but something happened that day and it made him ageless. What was in his eyes was grief and rage that far surpassed his boyish face and made him look like an aged soldier. A beast of war.

He buried his family.

It took four days.

And then he hunted them all.

At twelve years old he murdered six humans. He was damned, but the lust for revenge had damned him a long time before murder did. He killed them with the gypsy knives of his grandfather, and burned them until their bones were black and crisp as charred wood. He regretted nothing, and grieved for nothing, and was nothing... because he had no one.

He could've died long before his twenty eighth year, before he became vampire, and he didn't care. He was alone.

But now, seeing her face in his mind. Kate, short for Katarina. He was on his knees staring at the mud that would soon come up to meet his face and bury his body, and he thought of her. The way she lay there after they made love with the silk sheet slid down to her hip. She was trying to dream, that's what the sisters said. He stroked her arm and side and slid the sheet all the way down. She turned and they made love a second time, violently, as though this was the last night of their existence.

He pulled himself up. For her he would try to live. He would try to protect her even if she didn't want protecting. Like the time on the battlefield, their first battle together, when she had shocked him so badly the skin on his wrist began to split, but he didn't let go. He wouldn't ever let go.

He stumbled through the forest and when he reached the house he fell to the dirt again, as though the weight of relief was too much for his body to take. He got up again.

No, he didn't. He only thought he did. Instead he collapsed fully to the ground and his head hit the rock that he'd worked into the ground when he had been play fighting with Kate earlier. He lifted his hand to his head, his hair was matted with blood. How strange, to see your own blood again after so many years. He was weaker than he had been before.

As weak as a human.

Kate hadn't dreamed. But she no longer cared about dreams. Instead, what she did when she lay there on the silk sheets exhausted after pleasing him, and using his body to please herself, she thought of him. His face. His eyes locked with hers. His strong arms lifting her on top of him. His rough hands stroking her cheek. His lips on her neck. His teeth biting her earlobe. His chest rising and falling quickly. His hands guiding her hips to rhythm. The word that he whispers when she feels herself rising to the end.

'Kate.'

The moonlight bathed them in silver, and the night air blew the leaves from the forest into the bedroom and swept the curtains into a dance. A whirlwind was around them, but Kate cared nothing for it. The whole earth and the human world could've collapsed out of existence and still she wouldn't stop. She wouldn't ever stop.

'Garret.'

She was locked in her own mind, in her own thoughts, and didn't notice until now that he hadn't come back from his hunt.

She dressed herself in his shirt and went out into the living room. Her sisters had lit the fire and were playing cards in front of it. They laughed when she entered.

'You haven't any clothes of your own, sister?' said one.

'Garret ripped them all trying to reach her nudity,' said the other.

They laughed, and Kate ignored them. She walked over to the iPod that was playing songs from a playlist called '1920's Jazz Era,' and she turned it down.

'Have you seen him?' she said.

'Who?'

The sighed and held her arms out and nodded her head up and down the shirt. 'The only other 'him' we know.'

The sisters put down their cards, 'we thought he was with you. We thought he'd come back from his hunt now. How long has he been gone?'

'What time is it? Oh, he's been gone for four hours.'

The sisters stood up. It was remarkable how they could seem relaxed at one moment and then become ready to attack the next moment. But that is the vampire way; to enjoy a lengthy existence, but to be always ready to fight to keep it.

Kate looked at both her sisters. Her calm attitude and what seemed like nonchalance suddenly slipped to reveal the raw heart at the centre. 'Garret,' she whispered.

The three of them sped downstairs. But Kate, as though she shared a soul with him, was the first to find him.

He was lying on the ground in the rain, blood seeping from his head. 'No,' was all she could say, as if this word would make it all not true. 'No, Garret.' She fell to the floor beside him and lifted his head onto her knees. 'Garret, wake up. Wake up, Come on.'

She looked over at her sisters who were crying. 'Stop that,' she said. 'Stop it now, both of you, and get over here.'

They came over and stood over them both. 'Kate, is he?'

'NO! Don't even say that. No, he's not. Now help me. And stop snivelling.'

They took him inside the house and laid him on the bed in Kate's room. If he should die the eternal death, it should be where they had lain together.

Kate barked at her sisters, 'go and get some water, go and get some blood.' They sped from her side. She could hear them crying like ghosts in a gothic tale. She looked back at him. 'Garret, Garret, wake up.' She moved his hair out of his face and kissed his cheeks. 'Get the emergency blood!' she shouted.

'The blood bank blood? But Kate that's human,' they yelled from the kitchen.

'I don't care,' she snapped.

She didn't care. Not anymore. She was terrified, and this terror would push her to the limit of her own morality. She knew that for him, for her own selfish reasons, she would go and slaughter a hundred humans just to keep him with her. How deadly they both were apart, but how apocalyptic they were now that they were together. She was spoiled by him, she had become completely and wonderfully selfish, and she would kill anyone and anything that tried to take him away from her.

'Garret.'

Her sisters returned with the blood. It was in a plastic hospital issue bag. She snatched it and ripped it open with her teeth.

'Will he drink it?' The sisters said.

Kate looked down at him. His body and face were still. Vampires couldn't sleep and yet he looked to be sleeping, or beyond sleeping, in a coma or... or a death... of some sort. Kate looked at the bag, and then at her sisters.

'Kate, don't!' they said but it was too late. She drank a mouthful of human blood, something she hadn't tasted for fifty years, and she opened his mouth and kissed him. The liquid emptied from her mouth into his. It was a kiss of death, and life, a rekindling of a lustful addiction. She kissed him until his eyes opened. She did the same again, and again, until the bag was empty and his tongue entered her mouth, trying to lap the last traces of human blood from inside her. He held her head there until he was done, and he realised what was happening.

Kate's eyes were red.

'Katarina,' he whispered. There was pain in his voice. 'What did you do?'

She held her hands to her face. She was trying to stop herself crying but when he pried her hands away she couldn't hide it. 'I thought you were gone,' she said. He looked into her eyes. They burned for him; his very soul was contained within the confines of those ruby red irises. He kissed her, and she grabbed fistfuls of his hair and tugged them as though she was trying to punish him. 'I thought you were gone,' she said again. 'I did it for you.'

He kissed her again, and rubbed the blood from her face. 'I'll never leave you, Kate.' He brought her hands up to his face and kissed her thumbs. 'Even if I died eternally, I'd haunt you. I'd haunt you until you were tired of seeing my face.' He kissed her. 'Then I'd haunt you twice as much.'

Kate laughed. A laugh that was mingled with both relief and despair. She looked over to her sisters, and wiped the tears from her cheeks. 'Can you get me another bag? And bring me some deer blood?'

'That was the last one,' they said. 'You made us throw out all but one bag in case Garret became tempted by it, remember?'

Garret stood up, his face filled with horror. He was silent, reflecting on something that Kate couldn't understand. He looked up at them. 'That was the last of your blood supply?'

'Yes,' Kate said. 'But it's okay we have a forest full of blood. You'll just have to be content with deer and boar from now on.'

'You don't understand,' he said. The image of the old man in the chair returned to him, the blood, his granddaughter, his broken gums and the blood that oozed through the plastic pipe. It all returned to Garret like a trauma resurfacing. 'All the blood,' he said. 'It's been poisoned.'

Kate and her sisters exchanged looks. 'What do you mean,' said Kate.

Garret opened the curtains and looked out into the forest. Six lights flickered in the trees. Voices grew louder. There was laughter. 'He's coming,' Garret said.

Kate and her sisters bared their teeth and growled. They could hear the voices. No one from the town had ever dared come this far before, they believed that there were wolves in this part of the forest. 'How can someone poison the blood?' Kate said.

'He put something in the water, some kind of poison. All the humans and animals would have been drinking it. Kate, I can still feel it now.'

She stopped growling. Her eyes grew wide. 'Are you poisoned?'

Garret clutched his head. There was a pain, a white hot flash that made him squeeze his hands into fists until his palms bled. It went away again. 'Yes, but the blood helped I think.'

'What will the poison do?' She said, and he refused to meet her eyes. 'Garret, you tell me what the poison will do.'

'Kate, we have to go!' her sisters yelled. 'Something's coming.'

Kate rushed over to Garret and held his head so that he couldn't look away. 'What will it do?' she said.

'I don't know,' he said. 'And that's what scares me. When you saved me all I could think was how glad I was to see your face again.' He kissed her. 'But, something else was there too,' he said. 'I thirsted for something.'

'Yes,' she said. 'I gave you human blood.'

'No, he said. 'I didn't thirst for more human blood, Kate. I thirsted for something else.' He pushed her gently back and brought his hands to his face. 'I thirsted for your blood.'


End file.
